


Maximize Profit

by Sheliak



Category: A Matter of Profit — Hilari Bell
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Gen, Post-Canon, Swords
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-14
Updated: 2018-04-14
Packaged: 2019-04-18 23:15:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14223942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheliak/pseuds/Sheliak
Summary: Sabri, after.





	Maximize Profit

Sabri is alone, truly alone, for the first time in her life. Alone among aliens, who don’t value a warrior’s strength or code. (Among people who don’t believe that a woman is any less than a man.) Far from her parents, who betrayed her so (did they have any choice?) and far from the brother who risked so much to give her this chance. 

Far from her friends.  _Jennah, you will be an Empress worth dying for_ , she thinks fiercely. 

And she did die, in a way, for her Empress: the swordswoman died when they took her hand, the Vivitaire when her brother rescued her from Viv Redahd’s prison and sent her away. The woman remains—and the warrior.

It’s easier than she might have imagined to avoid her own people. The Vivitaire are few compared to those they conquered, and the T’Chin include dozens of species, all different from one another, some oddly like their new rulers. Among her own people, Sabri stood out—for her hair, for her unwomanly ways. Among the T’Chin she vanishes, like a raindrop hitting the ocean. 

She’s lonely, but that’s a small price to pay. 

She has a Nisol sword that she cannot use as it deserves and will not sell. She feels the loss of her sword hand every day; the prosthetic seems slow and clumsy to her, though her new acquaintances claim she’s adjusting well. The skills she was forced to learn as a Vivitaire woman are, marginally, more useful to her now than the ones she struggled and begged to learn; the irony is not lost to her.

Still, Sabri practices with the Nisol sword every night, using her off hand and her false one, trying to regain some measure of her own skill. She will never be what she was, but neither can she give up what she loved so dearly and fought for so long. And it would be a bitter shame to let her brother’s last gift to her gather dust in a corner.

By day she tries odd jobs, some that use the skills of her old life and some merely the strength of her back. She still has a bit of money left, even after buying her hand; but she knows it will not last. She might as well get used to earning her own way. And she finds, unexpectedly, that she can take pride in doing so. Standing on her own two feet, without recourse to her father’s power. It’s not what she wanted, but she finds pleasure in a job well done, a bargain struck. 

 _Maximize profit_ , the T'Chin say.

She has a lifetime to figure out what that means to her.

 


End file.
